Island Fire Read online

  “That’s crazy,” Sam said automatically. He squatted with her, their heads close together over the bag. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “I don’t feel safe here.” Their eyes locked, and Sam thought of all the challenges they’d been through, from the Boyz taking over their house to the man at the Lodge.

  “The Apucans will look out for us.”

  “I know they’ll try, but we’re taking up food and space. I can tell it’s going to be a strain on them. I don’t want us to be a burden. We should be with our own family.”

  Sam frowned. He’d seen Mrs. Apucan’s worried looks, too. “Where would we get a boat?”

  His heart had begun a series of heavy thuds as he thought of the windy, surging, deep channel between the islands. On the other hand, being with the Apucans had reminded him how great it was to be with Aunty, Uncle, and their cousins on Molokai—and he’d been thinking of them on and off all day. But what if they were having problems from the disaster, too?

  There was just no way to know.

  “There’s a wrecked Hobie cat washed up at the end of Shipwreck. I think we can rig it up to sail, be over there in just a few hours.”

  “What’re you guys talking about?” Jeremy inserted himself, his wide white grin inviting secrets. “Did you find any more comic books in the luggage off the plane?”

  “You’re so lucky. I did.” Bea dug in the bottom of the duffel and produced a couple of Spider-Man comics. She handed one to Jeremy and one to Sam. “We go tomorrow morning, Sam,” she said, command in her voice, as she found a clean rag to rub Rainbow down with.

  Chapter Seventeen

  When Nick finally reached the beach, it was nearly dark. His clothes, damp from the rain that had stopped on the other side of the cup of ridge that held the town, chafed his legs and kept him damp, so that even though it was warm, he shivered in the chill generated by a breeze blowing up the side of the island off the sea. Eventually, he took off his hoodie and jeans, slinging them over his shoulders and making his way down a path off the main road toward a beach he could clearly see.

  He spotted the rusting hulk of a shipwrecked cargo vessel embedded in the reef. It seemed so close from above, and yet, by the time he was at the beach, he was stumbling with hunger and tiredness.

  No one was around, thankfully, to see him walking along the dirt road above the beach, fish-belly-white legs gleaming in the dusk, boxers flapping, everything he owned in the world draped over his shoulder.

  It seemed like he’d walked forever when he finally spotted a dark structure that must be the fishing shack tucked under some tallish bushes. He fumbled his way inside.

  There wasn’t much to recommend it. The floor was sandy dirt, and he could feel a couple of splintery built-in bunk beds with no mattresses. There was another open door that faced the ocean, and a roof.

  That was all.

  Feeling in the dark, he hung his damp clothing from the edge of the top bunk and went out through the front opening.

  The moon lit a path bright as crumpled tinfoil across the black ocean. Reflections danced off tiny lapping waves. A nearby palm tree’s leaves rustled, and the sand looked like molten silver in the moonlight. This beach would be paradise on some other night, when he had a full belly and was warm, but now his body was racked with shivers. His stomach had gone from rumbling protests to a constant ball of aching.

  Nick sat in the sand looking at the ocean and sipped some water just to give his stomach something to work on. How could he catch fish with nothing to even make a hook and line out of? In the dark?

  Maybe he could trap some in a tide pool or something.

  But then how to cook them?

  No. He was just going to have to go to sleep hungry.

  At least he was too tired to care too much. With one last look at the mockingly pretty beach, Nick went back into the shack and lay down on the hard wooden bunk.

  Morning seemed to take forever to come. Nick woke a hundred times during the night to strange noises: squeaks and rustles in the long grass nearby, the unfamiliar shushing of surf and clattering of palm fronds. The pinch of hunger pangs and the jab of splinters from the bare wooden bunk alternated with waves of goose bumps rippling across his body as the night breeze blew over his chilled skin.

  Finally, it was light enough for him to see a hand in front of his face. He needed to find some way to catch fish, and he was ready to eat whatever he caught raw.

  Nick found a stick under the trees and a couple of rocks and spent a half an hour or so sharpening a point onto the stick. When it was sharp enough to hurt when he poked himself, he set off onto the reef. He left his shoes on, since they were still dirty and wet from the day before and he didn’t want to poke his feet on coral or sea urchins.

  An hour later, the sun was finally really up and Nick had done nothing but throw his makeshift spear at a few tiny fish that skittered away easily.

  He was beginning to feel light-headed when he went back in to the beach. He had to find something better than the stick. Maybe he could find some discarded fishing line and some way to make a hook.

  As he trekked back toward the shack, he spotted the twin plastic hulls of a faded Hobie cat protruding from a big pile of driftwood and debris.

  Perhaps he could clear the debris off and get to Maui on it.

  Almost immediately the impossibility of such an idea hit him. There was no mast or sail, not to mention he didn’t have a clue how to sail or even where Maui was. Still, he poked around in the debris pile, pulling the piled-up wood off the hulls. Along the way he found a scrap of net.

  He could use the net to trap fish. Nick untangled the net from the driftwood it was wrapped around and took his stick and went back onto the reef. He looked carefully until he found a deep tide pool with a smaller one attached. He strung the net across the opening of the smaller tide pool with room for fish to swim under it.

  Then he jumped into the waist-deep, bigger pool and, using the stick, tried to scare the fish hiding around the edges into the small pool.

  He saw a few dart in, but by the time he reached the net to lower it to the bottom and trap them, they’d darted back out.

  He peppered the air with curses and whacked the water in frustration. The sun was high by then. His back, as white as his legs, had begun to fry in earnest when he finally admitted defeat and went back to the shack.

  He would have cried if he’d had enough water left in his body to cry.

  He drank half the water bottle, looking back up the steep arid hump of the island in worry about what to do when the second bottle was gone. It was going to be a long, ugly walk back up to the village, where at least there was water and the possibility of food. He’d have to wait until nightfall when it was cooler.

  He stretched out on the bunk to sleep. There was nothing more he could do, and his body was simply giving out.

  Bea shook Sam’s shoulder and he woke groggily. There was a crease in his cheek from the crumpled Spider-Man comic he’d fallen asleep on. “Come on, Sam,” she whispered.

  Sam crawled out of the sleeping bag and rolled it up in the pale-gray predawn, hurrying. She saw him tuck the comic in with Jeremy. They sneaked out of the bedroom filled with the soft breathing of sleeping boys.

  In the kitchen, Bea filled water containers. “Take whatever food you can fit into your pack,” she said. “I brought a lot of fish in yesterday. That’ll pay for what we take.”

  She watched Sam fill his backpack with the granola bars that they’d brought from their cave, beef jerky, bags of nuts and raisins, and three oranges. Her mouth watered at the sight of the oranges and the thought of their citrusy deliciousness breaking open in her mouth.

  Bea put her finger over her lips for quiet, and they stuffed his tightly rolled sleeping bag into the pack and hoisted it up. They sneaked out of the house, and Bea led Rainbow out of the backyard, causing a chorus of protesting bleats from the goats.

  Bea mounted and gave Sam a hand up behind her. As they
approached the table rock outside of town, Bea pulled the mare up.

  “Just a sec. Got to leave Jaden a message.” She slid down and clambered up to the slit in the rock and stuck a bit of paper, folded into a diamond, into it.

  Bea felt all her doubts come back. They’d just sneaked out of the Apucans’ house, repaying the kind family with an unexplained departure and a raid on their nonperishable food supplies. Sam scooted back onto Rainbow’s rump so Bea could mount up, and this time she nudged the mare into a trot.

  The words she’d written on the note were burned into her mind.

  Don’t come after me. We are going to Molokai to our family there. Thank you for all you and your family did for us, but we have to get to our own family. Don’t worry. We’ll be fine. I’m letting the horse go after this, and I want you to find her. You know the places she likes to go. I will miss you.

  She’d ended the note without a signature. It was what they did in case anyone found their notes. It had been hard not to even draw a heart, hard not to tell Jaden what they were doing, but she knew he’d want to come if she did, and she couldn’t do that to the Apucans.

  Saying goodbye wasn’t something she knew how to do very well, anyway. Never had learned how. Just thinking of saying goodbye to her horse made her legs tighten, and Rainbow picked up her pace to a gentle canter. Sam’s arms tightened around her, and they crested the road out of the cup of mesa where Lanai City was held as if in the palm of a hand.

  From that ridge, the magnificent view opened with the morning-lit panorama of red-gold Molokai dead ahead, a mere nine wind-whipped ocean miles away.

  Don’t worry. I’ll be with you every inch of the way, Beosith said. She hadn’t heard from him yesterday except for the dog chase and realized she hadn’t missed him—the day’s dramas had been so all-consuming.

  “That boat better be there,” she muttered to the mo’o dragon, picturing the Hobie cat wreck he’d been sending her pictures of.

  It is. I wouldn’t lie to you.

  “What?” Sam asked, his chin grazing her shoulder. Her little brother was almost her height, and it was still a little surprising.

  “Nothing. We have to find something; then we can settle into the fishing shack.”

  Rainbow took them down their favorite well-worn goat track to Shipwreck, and they continued along the rutted red dirt frontage road to where it ended at a huge pair of boulders and became a fisherman’s trail.

  Keep going, Beosith said, so they rode the mare between the stones and along the trail to the far end of the beach. Around a jutting cliff, another beach began. In the corner of the farthest end of the beach was a huge tangle of washed-up driftwood, tangled plastic bottles, coral-covered scraps of old fishing nets—and protruding from the detritus, the faded twin hulls of an old Hobie cat.

  “See?” Bea slid off Rainbow to land in the sand. “We do have a boat.” She felt a wild burst of energy and excitement. They weren’t stuck here, kids without a home. They really could get to Molokai. Beosith would make sure they got there safely.

  “I don’t know, Bea.” Sam dismounted behind her. They took off their heavy packs and set them in the sand. “I don’t know.”

  “You’ll see. We’ll have to do some work, but I just know this is how we are going to get to Molokai to stay with Aunty and Uncle.” She approached the wreck. It was nearly buried in jumbo-sized driftwood and other trash. “Good thing all this junk was covering this up, or someone else would have taken it by now.” She spotted signs of activity around the wreck. “We got here just in time.”

  Bea pulled the driftwood off the buried hull. She and Sam worked together, lifting and hauling away broken branches, tangled piles of washed-up netting, various types of plastic trash, even a small plastic wading pool, until the boat was uncovered. In less than an hour they had it cleared, then stopped for a snack and water break. Chewing a piece of beef jerky, Bea eyed the remains of the Hobie.

  It had been orange at one time, and now the tops of the twin hulls had faded to peach. The trampoline was completely gone, but the aluminum frame connecting the hulls was intact. The mast was gone, and so were the rudders, and one of the hulls had a hole in it. She watched a crab scuttle out of the fist-sized hole.

  She had no idea what to do next.

  Bea had sailed on a tourist catamaran out of the main harbor once on a whale watch, so she knew how this kind of craft could skim through the water with little resistance and not a lot of sail even—but how to rebuild the craft?

  And with what? Just fixing the hole in the hull was beyond what they had in their backpacks. She didn’t even remember what a catamaran looked like rigged up, let alone how to sail one.

  She took a sip of water. “What now, Beosith?” she whispered.

  No answer from the dragon, but Sam held up a bleach bottle. “I think I can cut a piece of this out, and if we have some glue, or resin, we can fix that hole.”

  “Okay. Maybe we’ll have to go back to town.” She kept forgetting what a knack Sam had for fixing things.

  “Yeah. I think we can make a rudder out of these, maybe.” He held up a couple of squares of storm-battered plywood. “But we’re going to need nails. Some wire. Don’t know how we’re going to get those things we need. No stores are open obviously.” Sam had begun to assemble a pile of potentially useful items.

  “I have wire.” Bea opened her backpack, took out the spool she’d taken from the cave, and added it to the pile. “If you know what you need, I can find it.”

  “Hinges. More rope. A long pole for the rudder. Clamps. A windsurfer sail, with a boom and mast,” Sam muttered. “A couple of life preservers…”

  “A windsurfer sail?” Bea perked up. “I remember seeing one at the end of Kaiolohia Beach; must have washed in from Maui. Let me take Rainbow and go look. I can also try to find the rest of what you need.”

  Bea hauled herself onto Rainbow and trotted away, happy to have something she could do. They’d passed the fishing shack on her way out, but drawing adjacent to it now, she decided to stop and take a look inside, see if it was as habitable as she remembered.

  Bea backtracked to the fishing shack, built of silvery unpainted scrap lumber. The simple shelter was set back from the beach under a naupaka tree, the common beach shrub that often grew large enough to cast shade. Bea tied Rainbow out near a patch of grass, gave her some water in an old paint bucket she found at the shack, and went inside.

  She sucked in her breath in a gasp. “Nick!”

  The older boy was lying on the hard boards of one of the built-in wooden bunks nailed to the wall. Nick startled awake at her voice and lifted bleary blue eyes. His pale skin was burned a deep crimson across his face, shoulders, and back, and he wasn’t wearing anything but a pair of black boxers. “Bea!”

  He scrambled to sit up, and she turned her back, blushing, but not before she’d seen a lot of his long, muscular body. “I’m sorry to wake you up.”

  “Thank God you did.” She heard the rustling of him pulling on the jeans she’d spotted hanging off the upper bunk and slipping into the black T-shirt with Chicago Bulls on it. He joined her in the doorway, pushing his hair back and combing it with his fingers. “Please tell me you’ve got some food.”

  “Yes, but …we need to save it for something.” She felt bad saying it. She could see how hungry he was by his hollow eyes, and he tightened his belt around his narrow hips.

  He looked down, threading the belt through a loop. “I understand.”

  “No, it’s fine. Let me go get something for you to eat from our backpacks; then Sam and I can go fishing and we’ll make a real meal.” She led him outside and pulled up Rainbow’s reins. “You might as well know what we’re doing.” She hopped up on the mare and extended a hand to him. “You can pack on behind me.”

  “I’ve never ridden a horse before.” Nick’s cheeks had gone even redder, this time with embarrassment.

  “You scared?” She guided the horse up next to a rock. “Just sling a leg ov
er and put your arms around my waist.”

  Nick got up on the rock and, one hand on her shoulder, slung a leg over Rainbow and settled behind her tentatively. She could tell he was trying not to crowd her, but as Rainbow moved out with a snort at the extra weight, he tipped backward and had to grab her, pulling in close.

  Bea pretended indifference to the feeling of his jeans-clad thighs against the backs of her bare legs, his long arms tight around her waist as he clutched for balance. His cheekbone bumped the top of her head. He was so different from Jaden, who was closer to her size and familiar.

  “We’re just a short way up here.” Her voice came out breathless. “I was going to look for a windsurf sail. We’re going to get this Hobie cat ready to travel.”

  “I saw that,” Nick said. She felt him rest his cheek against her hair as he relaxed into the rhythm of Rainbow’s stride, settling his body around hers. “This isn’t so bad. Horseback riding.”

  “Maybe we should try a trot.”

  “No,” he said so quickly that she laughed.

  Just then they came around the corner to see the Hobie cat, uncovered, and her brother taking a break with the backpacks under one of the naupaka bushes.

  Sam scrambled to his feet. “You found Nick!”

  “He was sleeping in the fishing shack.”

  “And he’s hungry,” Nick chimed in. Sam laughed and opened one of the backpacks.

  “Just give him a granola bar and an orange to tide him over,” Bea said. “We need to go get some fish so we don’t use up our supplies.”

  “Sounds good. Oh, man. I’m looking forward to one of those oranges, too,” Sam said.

  “We deserve a treat after all that hard work,” Bea agreed.

  They clustered in the shade of the naupaka tree, sitting in the sand, and Sam handed them each an orange and Nick got a granola bar. Bea pretended not to hear the loud growl of Nick’s stomach as he wolfed down the food.